The gestures that spontaneously occur in communicative contexts have been shown to offer insight into a child's thoughts. The information gesture conveys about what is on a child's mind will, of course, only be accessible to a communication partner if that partner can interpret gesture. Adults were asked to observe a series of children who participated 'live' in a set of conservation tasks and gestured spontaneously while performing the tasks. Adults were able to glean substantive information from the children's gestures, information that was not found anywhere in their speech. 'Gesture-reading' did, however, have a cost - if gesture conveyed different information from speech, it hindered the listener's ability to identify the message in speech. Thus, ordinary listeners can and do extract information from a child's gestures, even gestures that are unedited and fleeting.

Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically assumed to be redundant with speech. Here we present data challenging this assumption, suggesting that these early pointing gestures serve a determiner-like function (i.e., point at bottle + "bottle" = that bottle). Using longitudinal data from 18 children (8 girls), we analyzed all utterances containing nouns and focused on (a) utterances containing an unmodified noun combined with a pointing gesture and (b) utterances containing a noun modified by a determiner. We found that the age at which children first produced point + noun combinations predicted the onset age for determiner + noun combinations. Moreover, point + noun combinations decreased following the onset of determiner + noun constructions. Importantly, combinations of pointing gestures with other types of speech (e.g., point at bottle + "gimme" = gimme that) did not relate to the onset or offset of determiner + noun constructions. Point + noun combinations thus appear to selectively predict the development of a new construction in speech. When children point to an object and simultaneously label it, they are beginning to develop their understanding of nouns as a modifiable unit of speech.

Speech and gesture provide two different access routes to a learner's mental representation of a problem. W e examined the gestures and speech produced by children learning the concept of mathematical equivalence, and found that children on the verge of acquiring the concept tended to express information in gesture which they did not express in speech. We explored what the production of such gesture-speech mismatches implies for models of concept learning. Two models of a mechanism that produces gesture-speech mismatches were tested against data from children learning the concept of mathematical equivalence. The model which best fit the data suggests that gesture and speech draw upon a single set of representations, some of which are accessible to both gesture and speech, and some of which are accessible to gesture but not speech. Thus, gesture and speech form an integrated system in the sense that they do not draw upon two distinct sets of representations. The model implies that when new representations are acquired, they are first accessible only to gesture. Over time, they are then recoded into speech.

Perceptual aspects of events, such as the visual prominence of event participants, have been shown to influence how people describe events. We investigate the relationship between such perceptual effects and patterns of eyegaze, focusing on a little- explored perceptual manipulation: the extent to which an event participant is wholly or partially visible. Using an eyetracking method, we found a correlation between this perceptual contrast and patterns of eyegaze at the beginning of the event but not the end. This finding supports the view that early visual attention to events has important downstream consequences for event conceptualization and linguistic description.

Studying the silent gesture of hearing non-signers is a crucial tool for shedding light on natural language phenomena.Previous studies have found that properties of the meanings conveyed in silent gesture can influence word order. Forinstance, participants prefer SOV ordering for extensional events (man carries ball), while for intensional events (in whichthe object is possibly non-existent or dependent on the action; e.g., man thinks of guitar, woman builds house) there isa cross-linguistic preference for SVO (Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014). Eliciting descriptions of the two event types inNicaraguan Sign Language, we found evidence for these lab-documented word order preferences in an emergent naturallanguage: objects precede verbs for extensional events, but follow verbs for intensional events. However, this wordorder pattern is manifested differently in Nicaraguan Sign (the result only surfaced in a sub-string analysis), because thepreference interacts with NSLs language-internal constraint for verb-finalness.

Sensitivity to the causal structure underlying phenomena iscritical to expert understanding. Fostering such understandingin learners is therefore a key goal in education. Wehypothesized that observing analogical gestures—whichrepresent relational information in visuospatial format—would lead learners to notice and reason about underlyingcausal patterns, such as positive and negative feedback.Participants watched brief video lectures about the humanbody and the plant kingdom, which were delivered along withgestures representing either: 1) visuospatial details (iconicgesture condition); or 2) relational structure (analogicalgesture condition). In a subsequent classification task, relativeto participants who saw iconic gestures, participants who sawanalogical gestures were more likely to sort the phenomenadescribed in the videos—as well as novel phenomena—bytheir causal structure (e.g., positive feedback). The resultssuggest that analogical gestures can be harnessed to fostercausal understanding.

When speakers gesture, their gestures shape their thoughts, but how this happens remains unclear. What kinds of feedback from gesture—visual, proprioceptive, or both— drive these cognitive effects? Here we address this question using a test bed previously employed to explore gesture’s cognitive effects (Beilock & Goldin-Meadow, 2010). Participants solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, explained their solutions in speech and gesture, and solved the puzzle a second time. Previous studies using this paradigm have demonstrated that the gestures participants produce during the explanation phase affect their ability to solve the problem the second time. Unlike these prior studies, however, participants in the present study were blocked from seeing their hands while they gestured. Despite this absence of visual feedback, our results replicate previous studies in which visual feedback was available. These findings suggest that gesture may shape thought through proprioceptive feedback alone.